Systems Engineer, DNS

About Us

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.

Available Locations: Austin, TX

About the DNS team

Cloudflare runs one of the largest DNS infrastructures in the world. We provide authoritative DNS for millions of Internet properties and operate 1.1.1.1, a public recursive resolver. Aggregated our authoritative DNS and resolver platforms handle around 3 trillion DNS queries per day.

Our DNS systems are custom built internally, so we’ve developed a lot of proprietary technology that operates at scale, iterating constantly to meet new scaling and reliability requirements. The work spans protocol implementation, distributed systems, performance, reliability, and the operational tooling behind them.

Our team builds and operates both services, plus the systems that publish records, distribute changes, and serve queries across Cloudflare's global network.

About the role

As a Systems Engineer on the DNS team at Cloudflare, you will be a key contributor to one of the core systems that help build a better Internet. You will take ownership of medium-to-large projects, driving them from initial design to successful completion with some supervision.

In this role, you will act as a natural point of contact for your projects, mentor junior engineers, and help improve the resilience and architecture of our systems. We are looking for an engineer who can solve complex issues with minimal help and contribute to shaping features and processes within a talented, collaborative team.

Responsibilities

Maintain and expand our DNS infrastructure, implementing features for our customers.

Write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code that simplifies and improves our systems

Act as a subject matter expert for moderately complex systems, becoming a go-to person for questions about the projects you work on.

Proactively identify issues affecting the team and propose effective solutions to improve our processes and technology.

Collaborate with Product and other stakeholders to provide meaningful input on product requirement documents (PRDs).

Serve as a mentor and onboarding guide for junior team members, helping them grow through thoughtful code and design reviews.

Debug and resolve complex service issues with minimal assistance, improving system resilience through refactoring and re-architecting.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience

BA/BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Strong systems programming fundamentals,